Spinster (22 page)

And so during the day I'd sit at my desk and speed-read and take notes; at night I'd circulate among dinner parties at the homes of graduate-school friends and coast the ever-rotating publicity wheel of book launches and readings, where everyone was a potential employer or, increasingly, a guy I'd gone on a date with.

I'd been surprised to discover that the retrograde practice of “dating” was standard protocol, even though its implicit rules (boys pay; girls don't go all the way) had nothing to do with new social and sexual norms.

In college we'd roamed in loose herds from dining hall to coffeehouse to dorm room. Only rarely did we splinter away to actual off-campus restaurants, in which case the couple would split the bill. I wouldn't have been offended if my boyfriend had offered to pay—it just would have felt unbelievably weird. Here in the city it was actually expected that a man would ask, the woman would accept, and the man would pay, no question.

Occasionally an invitation entailed a movie or museum exhibit, but most often it was dinner or drinks, or more likely drinks, then dinner, then more drinks, whole evenings afloat on a river of vodka, a bottle (or two) of wine—which, by the way, I did not object to in the slightest. Dates were a luxurious relief from the grind of my everyday. A bistro's theater of decorousness, with its snowy white napkins and courteous waiters, and afterward, the degenerate bliss of a dimly lit bar, the clink of ice against glass,
the soft gasp of a popped cork, the airy sensation of stepping back out into a night blurred at the edges with boozy wonderfulness…oh, how I loved it.

For the first time I felt like an actual person who lives in the world and could carry on a conversation with another adult about something other than the minutiae of what I did that day and whose turn it was to get the groceries. Coupling, I realized, can encourage a fairly static way of being, with each partner exaggerating or repressing certain qualities in relation to the other's. Along with meeting new people I was discovering a new self.

In the beginning I insisted on paying my half on principle and out of habit, until I realized that doing so sent the wrong message, no matter what I said. Apparently paying for dinner was how a man signaled his motives, proving to me—and himself—that he considered this “more” than a hookup. By accepting his offer I was showing that I understood.

As intended, playing by the rules left little room for ambiguity. I'm not proud to admit that more than a few times I went ahead and had sex with someone out of an obligatory sense of quid pro quo, even a confused sense of etiquette. Sometimes it was just less awkward to go with it. Perversely, even these baldly compromised transactions intrigued me, simply for being something I hadn't experienced before.

Generally, after three dates one of three things took place: 1) he'd express his lack of interest with a silent fade-out that made me go insane with anxiety; 2) I'd express my lack of interest with an overlong and tortured “it's not you, it's me” e-mail; 3) we'd devolve into a sexual entanglement that either was or wasn't physically satisfying but invariably thrived on noncommunication. After a while it seemed that everyone I knew was tangled in several entanglements at a time, as if we were all becoming intertwined, like a giant rat king, our tails a knotted mass, our mouths gasping for air.

Eventually I met a man at a lecture, and something clicked. He was ten years older, an art history professor so opaque and emotionally unavailable he might as well have been married, though he wasn't. Where R had been open and soulful, his emotions rushing forth through his eyes, every part of him leaning in to invite and comfort, T was intensely private, and interested solely in seduction, the achievement of which made his face close like a vault. But he was brilliant and courtly and subtle, with strong hands and a powerful torso that put me in mind of the Minotaur. The first time I went to his apartment, we started to kiss the moment he opened the door, then backed into a wall and slid to the floor. After that there was no going back. Every week or two he'd take me out to dinner at some restaurant I never could have afforded, where we'd talk about all kinds of things—his mind was so different from mine; I loved our conversations—then bring me back to his place in a cab; in the morning, before he woke up, I'd slip out of his bed and into my clothes and walk the thirty or so blocks through the just-stirring city to my apartment, euphoric.

To not be someone's girlfriend, to have excellent sex on a semi-regular basis without any of the obligations and expectations of being in an exclusive relationship—I couldn't get enough of it. Days would pass without our speaking or e-mailing, an oasis of solitude, and then his name would pop up in my in-box, and my pulse would race as we set our next date. The day of, concentrating on work was impossible; the simple acts of bathing and getting dressed took on ritualistic importance. By the time I was walking to the subway to meet him my self had vanished. I was all body, only body; indeed, nothing in my adult life had distilled me so thoroughly to pure physicality—it was like the days of track meets in high school, how I could focus only on the half-mile race to
come that afternoon, and then the sickening thrill of the starting line, the entire universe narrowed to my single lane, the loud bark of the gun, the exhilaration of sprinting with and then through and then past a pack of girls, rounding the final bend, pounding down the finishing stretch, empty of everything but muscle and sinew and breath.

Obviously, this couldn't last.

And yet it did. And as the weeks and then months spun past we stuck like a song on repeat, never growing closer, never breaking off, and I began to grow uneasy. What
was
this? I'd been looking for romance without commitment, and now that I had it, I fell down a rabbit hole of semantics, anxious to define and control the experience with a word.

Though we went on dates this wasn't “dating,” which implies a mutually agreed upon sense of forward momentum, yet surely two people couldn't just “hook up” for this long, and, anyway, our dates had the high tenor of “assignations,” a term I rejected on account of neither of us being married or otherwise committed, though it did make me realize that there's no masculine version of “mistress,” seeing that “lover” is gender-neutral and for some reason has fallen out of use, which saddened me; I liked how the word suggests there might be others in the mix, cloaking its user in a mysterious indefinability, the exact opposite of those rigid designations “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” and “wife” and “husband,” which carry the associative weight of specific expectations and behaviors, and make everyone involved seem boringly transparent, even though, of course, they're not.

After a while, some of my friends started to say that he was “using” me, but I rejected that, too, on account of being too pat, too self-help; I was an equal player in this scenario, and who's to say I wasn't “using” him, even if for reasons I couldn't understand? Either way, a relationship based exclusively on dinner and sex was beginning to feel perilously like a business deal, one step
from prostitution. One night, after too much wine, I made the cab stop and clambered out, announcing, “You know, I'm not your concubine!” He pulled me back in.

I wasn't proud of our “situation,” as I came to think of it, and it didn't make me remotely happy in any rational or traditional sense, and yet I loved it absolutely, for how free I felt, and alive. The novelty and unpredictability were addictive; I grew increasingly disembodied, or maybe only-bodied is more accurate, retreating ever further into a counterintuitive sexual solipsism—counterintuitive in that, practically speaking, my involvements were multiplying. In between our dates I went on other dates, with other men.

Only now are we beginning to understand how profoundly the decoupling of sex from marriage has shaped modern courtship and the family. By the time I entered the fray, what seemed more immediately pressing was the decoupling of sex from emotion. Compared with Edna's all-in, no-holds-barred philandering, mine felt oddly…prophylactic.

Granted, my proclivities skewed my findings. At last, I was sustaining a life more wild, and less bounded, than the one I'd known again and again through serial monogamy, but—paradoxically—in my quest to not be “tied down,” rather than open the door to all comers, I'd unconsciously altered my very chemistry: where once I'd gone for emotionally available men, I was now irresistibly drawn to the noncommittal, who had no interest in making me their girlfriend.

With them I felt bracingly invisible, objectified, absent, as if I could be anyone I wanted, no matter that my reinventions were almost comically modest and legible only to myself; for someone like me, who'd always remained within her fixed identity, the
smallest alteration was an adventure. The type of man who (unsuspectingly) helped make this happen certainly wasn't in short supply, and they seemed to pride themselves on this quality, as if evasiveness were evidence of manliness.

What bothered me was the assumption that because I was a woman in her early thirties, I must be “desperate” for marriage. At first this seemed only irritating; every romantic encounter arrived in the same cumbersome frame I had to repeatedly dismantle. But after a while, the fixedness of this belief felt not merely claustrophobic and repetitive but downright pernicious. Figuring out how you feel about another person is a notoriously complicated business. The ubiquity of received attitudes about what men and women did and did not want seemed to relieve everyone of the responsibility to actually examine their desires, leading to some pretty bizarre behavior.

One stifling August, a man I'd been only casually involved with—we hadn't even had sex—asked me to meet him for a drink. He was a good-looking lawyer with a dry wit, and we had an odd, sweet relationship; every so often he'd take me out for a romantic dinner, hold my hand as he walked me home, kiss me good-bye at my doorstep, and more often than not, not come in. We obviously enjoyed our time together, but something fundamental was missing.